Namaste - Lost

"The light within me honors the light within you"

LaFleur was once again front and center in last night's episode of Lost. Fine by me. Time spent with Jim/James/LaFleur/Sawyer is time well spent. Which is why I was delighted to discover that ABC has added a new game to their Lost website: A Nickname Generator. With a couple clicks of the mouse, you too can have a Sawyer-inspired nickname. Mine's Gizmo. Jessica's is Sheriff. Please refer to me only as Gizmo from here on out.

But I digress. I, Gizmo digress, I mean. Back to "Namaste," which didn't get a whole lot of explication - the title of the episode that is. If you would like to know more about the meaning of this greeting - most commonly used at the end of yoga class - check out this wiki page.

In many ways, this episode was all about plot progression. As the first episode of the second half of the season, its main function was to move the story forward. And it did. We didn't get back story, or whole lot of conspiracy, or even much in the way of an emotional reunion. That will probably please some and piss off others.

What we got - or, rather, where we got to - was a bit of an impasse. The returnees have come back to the island, but now what? Much has changed in the three years they've been away - particularly for Juliet and Sawyer, who have established a life and a sense of balance that has now been fundamentally disrupted by the return of their former castaways. What the plan is from here on out, and what purpose each of them have on the island, is something none of them seems quite sure of.

The one with the most to lose? Sawyer, who's gone from gut-instinct rogue to calculating leader - a transition borne out of the fact that the man with nothing to lose now has a lot at stake. How far will he go to hang onto what he's found on the island - and within the Dharma Initiative? That remains to be seen. At this point, they all seem rather befuddled by what's in front of them.

One thing I found particularly interesting about this episode was Jack's response to the whole Dharma/Sawyer/LaFleur paradigm shift. Though there was certainly tension in his "I'm the man now, dog" tete-a-tete with Sawyer, and a hint of "eff you" when he was relegated to Workman status, on the whole, Jack appeared totally blissed out. He seemed neither opposed to the handing over of the torch to Sawyer, or in favor of it. Same with the whole Dharma recruits plan. Has Jack achieved some sort of inner peace - a kind of Namaste - now that he's back on the island? Or is he just biding his time, waiting to see how all the pieces of this new 1977 existence come together?

From what we saw in the previews for next week's episode, and from the description that follows, those pieces begin to come together (or rather to fall apart and explode) in next week's episode - with "Hostile" Sayid playing a crucial role in the mayhem:

Things begin to unravel when one of the survivors goes rogue and takes matters into their own hands -- risking the lives of everyone on the island.

More thoughts/questions/comments from "Namaste":

- The episode opened in the cockpit of the Ajira flight. Sitting next to Lapidus was a co-pilot, a co-pilot who was impaled upon impact. Impaled...as in dead...as in perfectly primed to be propped up and put on the bottom of the ocean along with the Ajira plane to serve as the Oceanic 815 decoy plane. I posited this theory a few weeks back. I'm not sure if anyone's buying it, but I think the co-pilot serves as further confirmation of this theory and I'm sticking to it.

- Speaking of conspiracies, I think the fact that we saw the Ajira plane land on the runway gives a solid boost to the theory that this whole time travel, get the Oceanic'ers back to the island and back into 1977 thing was planned from the very beginning. By Ben? By Widmore? By Alpert? By all of them. That, I'm not completely sure of, but a master plan is definitely in the making. One that goes beyond the Others vs. Dharma decoy war.

- We were also given confirmation that Hydra Island, where the plane crashed, is in a different time period (2007) than the main island (1977). One very interesting question - worth pondering - is why some were chosen to be time warped onto the main island and into 1977, while some landed onto Hydra Island in the present day. Who chooses? And how?

- I was quite happy that Hurley landed in the same place as Jin, if for no other reason than so he could exclaim, "Dude, your English is awesome!"

- Speaking of Jin and Sun, they are separated by a couple of decades. Star-crossed lovers who are starting to fade fast - at least for me. We did see Sun display some battle worn nerves of steel this week, when she bopped Ben on the head big time, declared, with an eerie calm, "I lied," and headed over to the main island and into the creepily abandoned Dharma house with Lapidus to talk to...who else?...Christian Shephard. Will Daddy Shep be able to lead them on their journey back into the past?

- Speaking of daddies, the Big Daddy of the Dharma Initiative, Pierre Chang, made a real life appearance in this week's episode, confirming, as we suspected, that he is indeed on the island in 1977.

- Another big reveal? The identity of Amy's baby. Who we learned was...drum roll...Ethan. You remember Ethan? The uber-creepy Other who tried to kidnap pregnant Claire (babies, babies, babies) and who was the first to be killed by the Oceanic'ers. Very interesting that the first baby to be born was the first man to be killed.

- On the whole, the Dharma peeps don't seem to be giving the Oceanic'ers too much trouble. Except for Phil - who seemed to be wary of Jack's late-night visit to LaFleur - and Radzinsky, who didn't like that Sayid saw his plans for The Swan. These two could be trouble, but then again, only if they're supposed to be...at least according to the pre-determined logic of Daniel Faraday, who has strangely disappeared.

- Perhaps the best moment of "Namaste," for me, Gizmo, was the big reveal of Little Ben. We had been waiting for Little Ben to show up in 1977 and he did - in the perfect place and at the perfect time. The one-time prisoner becomes the imprisoner, as Little Ben and Sayid square off in a role-reversal 30-years-before (but also 3-years-after) their tortuous encounter. Will Sayid attempt to take out Little Ben once and for all? My money's on no, but it'll be interesting to if he'll try.

Until next week, Gizmo here, signing off.